Kakao Games and Bluepoint getting together for sheer acceptable.
Elyon is an MMO-ass MMO, and I can say just that sentence and people will immediately either get more interested or completely lose interest. Granted you’re here on MMO Fallout where I can’t dedicate all of my time to explaining why another Steam dev got banned. So we’re going to talk about some actual MMOs.
I could simply refer to Elyon as Tera 2.0 and call it a day. The big difference between Elyon and Tera is that Elyon isn’t built from stolen Lineage code, at least not that we’re aware of. Presumably none of Elyon’s employees have gone to prison for stealing Lineage code either. Tera also had dreams of a box price and mandatory subscription when it launched. What a weird year 2012 was.
After playing the first 30 levels of Elyon, taking part in a couple events, doing some fishing, and leveling my gear, I can say without a doubt that this is definitely an MMO. Elyon is an action MMO that uses traditional number keys to dish out attacks on a rotating cycle. Attacks beget combos that do additional damage and occasionally inflicts status debuffs. Leveling up provides new skills as well as points to augment those skills to your preferred flavor.
The good news is that Krafton seems to have gotten with the times, in a manner of speaking. Not present are concepts like the Elin from Tera, an elder race that oddly enough look like very little girls dressed up in lingerie. There also aren’t any succubus dominatrix races here. Which isn’t to say there isn’t enough boobage, butt cheek, aggressive navel, and thigh meat to feed an army. You can even customize your own hot goth gf.
There also aren’t any gender-locked races. I picked the Ein race which incidentally has no gender period apparently. The Ein are the furry race. Those are still here.
As you level up the game shuffles you between quest hubs at what feels like a predetermined pace. You hit a hub where the next story quest needs you to get to level 30, the quests in that hub get you to exactly level 30. Choice is an illusion. Subscribe to my Patreon. The entire leveling system appears to be an elongated tutorial, with the game still shoving tooltips at the tier of “don’t let your HP fall to zero” after dozens of levels.
It quickly goes from “oh they’re just teach people how to play” to me desperately trying to dismiss the same tooltip that’s been popping up in my notifications dozens of times over the course of an hour. There’s teaching and then there’s treating the player like a barely literate moron, and Korean MMOs especially have a habit of teetering into that second category.
Elyon has AFK stuff…ish. Like fishing. At least in the sense that if you don’t respond to your rod getting a bite within three minutes the game will catch it for you and cast back into the water. This isn’t the same as Black Desert Online where you can build up an entire character around AFK fishing. Fishing rods (at least the ones I’ve seen so far) only have a limited durability and each fish takes up its own spot in your inventory. So AFK fishing won’t get you far.
Also in the game is auto-run. You know, I’m fine with that at this point since there’s no auto-combat. If I can let my character run to the next town and go fill my coffee cup or make a toilet run, I won’t complain. As long as the game isn’t literally playing itself.
My first and so far only experience with PvP was a zerg-rush cluster f in one of the leveling zones. It wasn’t unenjoyable, but I can see Elyon becoming one of those games where one faction will beat the ever loving crap out of the other in a completely one-sided war.
It’s clear that Elyon is going to follow the standard monetizaton practices of its ilk. There are gacha boxes for mounts, presumably for pets, convenience boosters, cosmetics, and for predatory gear enhancement systems that threaten to break your stuff unless you buy protection items. While Elyon might not be heading into shameless pay to win territory just yet (the store technically isn’t active), it’s definitely setting up the systems meant for milking whales. If you’re expecting a world where hardcore free players can reasonably compete against high rollers, look for another game. I don’t think the average casual player will hit the point where this will be an issue, however.
There are a bunch of other half-baked ideas in Elyon like the gliders from ArcheAge that I only used once for a quest and never found another piece of land high enough to actually jump off of. The leveling system is complete jank and already has players praying that they’ve sped it up for beta. They probably haven’t. I hit level 34 within just a couple of hours. If you go by the map the max level appears to be 50, which tells me the leveling process is about to slow to a deep crawl.
If you’re familiar with how a lot of companies use a very similar recipe in their marinara sauce, that being your cheap generic pre-made spaghetti, pizza, and other frozen foods, Lunchables, Bagel Bites, and such, then you understand what Elyon is. At the end of the day, Elyon is shaping up to be cheap, generic, derivative, and leaning on condescending in parts. All of this to service a ship clearly meant to be heavily reliant on pay to win and gacha mechanics for its income.
Which isn’t to say it has no value, just nothing you can’t get from a myriad of other sources. I’d be wary of any MMO websites whose previews celebrate this game as innovative. Someone’s been paid off or has never played an MMO from the last decade.
Elyon isn’t terrible, but it isn’t something you should be jumping out of your seat to play. It’s a place you’ve been to a thousand times before, and will likely visit plenty more times in the future. Perfectly adequate for a game, expectantly predatory as a free to play MMO (Elyon is buy to play, by the way). Maybe avoid those expensive pre-order editions when they show up later this year, right?
MMO Fallout 